Josh, you asked for em' and here we go. This Max Boot guy is a real deal, over the top neocon. I found some wild stuff:
"Afghanistan and other troubled lands
today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once
provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
(Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2003)
From his book,
The Savage Wars Of Peace: Small Wars And The Rise Of American Power:
In the closing pages of his book, Max Boot quotes Kipling’s poem:
Take up the White Man’s burden-
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard
Wow! You know you're a neocon true believer when you start quoting The White Man's Burden.
He also says:
“Many Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans, and others may secretly have welcomed U.S. rule.”
“In
the early twentieth century, Americans talked of spreading Anglo-Saxon
civilization and taking up the ‘white man’s burden’; today they talk of
spreading democracy and defending human rights. Whatever you call it,
this represents an idealistic impulse that has always been a big part
in America’s impetus for going to war.”
Max Boot is also a fan of small wars:
"What
kind of war are we fighting? The answer in my book, is that it’s a
small war, “small war” being a literal translation of the Spanish word guerrilla,
and being a term of art that was popular around 1900 to refer to
encounters between Western troops and irregular or guerrilla forces in
the Third World. These kinds of operations, or the kind we’re now
seeing in Afghanistan, have very little in common with the “big wars,”
with World War II or the Civil War, but they are commonplace in our
history.
To
give you an indication of how common they are, let me just throw out
one figure, which is 180 landings of Marines abroad between 1800 and
1934. Between 1800 and 1934, American Marines landed abroad more than
once a year. Unfortunately, we have forgotten about American landings
in places like Sumatra in 1834, or in Korea in 1871, or in Samoa in
1899. What I try to do with my book is to resurrect that lost history
and to show how it applies to our current dilemmas."
